The Logical Blog by IconLogic

Adobe Captivate: Runtime Dialog Boxes

by Kevin Siegel, COTP, CTT

In Adobe Captivate, dialog boxes can appear that require the learner to click something (such as an OK button). These dialog boxes, which aren't created by the Captivate developer and are instead created automatically by Captivate when the project is published, are known as Runtime Dialogs. For instance, the dialog box shown below is an example of a Runtime Dialog box. A learner will see this dialog box if a quiz has Captivate's Submit All feature enabled and the learner clicks Submit All prior to answering all of quiz questions.

I think you will agree that the dialog box isn't the most attractive thing in the world. Wouldn't it be nice if you had control, at least to some extent, over how it looked? Oh but of course you do... choose Edit > Object Style Manager. From the left side of the dialog box, click Runtime Dialog. (Go ahead, admit it, you've got mad skills in Captivate and have edited Object Styles before... but goodness, this is the first time you've noticed the Runtime Dialog option.)

At the right side of the dialog box, you'll have access to several options including Background and Button Fill colors, Text color, and more. There are also a few Font Settings that will allow you to change the Font and Font Style.

And that's it... click the OK button to close the Object Styles Manager. The next time a learner sees dialog boxes, they'll follow your edited style.

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Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP, is the founder and president of IconLogic. Following a career in Public Affairs with the US Coast Guard and in private industry, Kevin has spent decades as a technical communicator, classroom and online trainer, public speaker, and has written hundreds of computer training books for adult learners. He has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

Free Countdown Timer... Perfect for Live, Online Classes

Did you say you wanted something cool... and for free? OK, fine! This countdown timer is the perfect thing to display when you send your online class out on a break (and you're concerned they'll just never come back on time). The time is an Adobe AIR application that will run on Macs and PCs and features custom away and return messages, along with multiple timer settings. You can download the timer, along with several other eLearning assets (again, all free) here.

Adobe Captivate: Preview In Browser Fix

by Kevin Siegel, COTP During our live, online beginner Adobe Captivateclass, you learn about previewing your project pretty quickly. You will find the following menu items in the Preview drop-down menu of a standard project: Play Slide, Project, Next 5 slides, In Browser, HTML5 in Browser, Preview in SCORM Cloud, and In Adobe Edge Inspect. The two modes that I use the most are Next 5 slides and In Browser. Next 5 slides is awesome if you want to get a quick look at some of your slides but don't need to see them all; In Browser is great if you want to get a more acurate representation of what your published lesson will look like to a learner and test all of the interactivity. It is worth noting that I mentioned the meu items you'll see in a standard project. If you're working on a Responsive Project, the Preview menu is a bit different. In the first image below you'll see the menu items I listed earlier. In the second image, notice that In Browser is missing along with HTML5 in Browser. Because Responsive Projects are only HTML5, prevewing a Responsive Project opens a web browser just like previewing a standard project In Browser.

Previewing in my web browser has always worked perfectly... until it didn't. Suddenly, and without warning, when attempting to preview in my browser, I saw a brief blink on my display but that was it. Fortunately, I was able to fix the problem pretty easily. (It wasn't a Captivate problem but a Windows 10 problem caused by a recent Windows update.) I clicked Start on my Windows Taskbar and went to Settings. From there I clicked System and then Default apps.

Once within the Default Apps screen, I changed my default browser to Microsoft Edge. Then, back in Captivate, I was delighted to see that my In Browser preview worked once again.

While I am not a Microsoft Edge user and rely more on Google Chrome, I found that selecting any browser besides Edge didn't work at first in Captivate. However, after changing the default browser to Edge and confirming Captivate was once again working, I went back and set my default browser to Chrome.

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Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP, is the founder and president of IconLogic. Following a career in Public Affairs with the US Coast Guard and in private industry, Kevin has spent decades as a technical communicator, classroom and online trainer, public speaker, and has written hundreds of computer training books for adult learners. He has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

MadCap Flare: Plenty of Style

by Neil Perlin

MadCap Flare has some of the most powerful style features in the online authoring world. However, working with styles can seem confusing due to some seemingly odd behavior.  For instance, the available styles in the Styles pane seem to change without warning.  Check out the two images below. The Styles pane is shown at the right of the Flare interface in both images. In the first image, notice that, among other things, nothing is selected and there is a list of heading styles (h1, h2, etc) in the Styles pane.  In the second image, I've simply selected some text but the Styles pane looks very different (no heading styles are shown).

What’s going on? Flare is trying to help by only showing styles that are relevant at the cursor’s position. For example, if you click in a paragraph but don’t select any text, or select an entire paragraph (including the hard return at the end), Flare shows the paragraph styles.  Select anything less than a full paragraph, like a word, and Flare shows the character styles. The result? You don’t have to wade through a bunch of styles that are irrelevant to your position in the document. This also has two side effects. Many new Flare users use the head styles for topic titles and sub-titles but still do local formatting – using the formatting options in the Font section of the Home ribbon – to boldface or italicize text. This works but it’s inefficient. Instead, to boldface or italicize text, highlight the desired text and select the desired style on the Styles pane. Flare’s handling of list styles is confusing at first. For example, the screen below shows a list to-be, the three highlighted items, but no list styles on the Styles pane. Why?

Although this is a list to-be, it’s still just three paragraphs as far as Flare is concerned so Flare isn’t showing any list styles. To see list styles, you have to first “tell” Flare that these three items are an actual list.  To create a list, select the text, then select a list option in the Paragraph group on the Home ribbon. (Yes, this is local formatting, just once to tell Flare that the text is a list.)  In the example below, I selected the bulleted list option. The three items are now a bulleted list and, because Flare knows that, it can display the List styles in the Styles pane.

Note that the Styles pane is showing one list style, li (for List Item). That’s because li is the only predefined list style.  You can create your own list styles – bullets and numbers at different levels or with different bullet or number types, for example – and they’ll all display on the Styles pane once Flare knows that you are in a programmatically “true” list. There’s a lot more to Flare’s styles and the stylesheet editor. We’ll look at some of those features in later articles. For now, it’s important to know that the Styles pane isn't as confusing as it seems... and is, in fact, actively making you work more efficiently.

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Neil Perlin is MadCap-Certified for Flare and Mimic, and is a long-time consultant, troubleshooter, and trainer for the tool, going back to MadCap’s founding in 2004. He also has years of experience with other authoring tools like RoboHelp and Doc-To-Help and some now defunct tools like ForeHelp. He is also a certified app developer, trainer, and consultant for the ViziApps app development platform. You can reach him at [email protected] and at NeilEric on Twitter.

eLearning : Three Tips For Better Color Usage

by Sally Cox, COTP

Tip #1:  Be Transparent Perhaps being transparent isn’t the best thing in real life. But in eLearning? Yes! I use transparent shades under areas of text I want to highlight for the learner, but I don’t want it to be distracting in any way. A transparent yellow is a choice I often use because it’s neutral and works with almost any color palette. Or, you can choose one of your corporate palette colors. Even a light gray can work well. The objective is to draw subtle attention to the text, but still allow the learner to absorb the rest of the content on the slide.

Tip #2:  Use Color to Train the Learner Using a single color for all learner interactions is a great trick because your learner will automatically know they need to engage when they see that color. This is especially useful for beginners or learners who lack computer experience.  Setting all interactive elements to the same color scheme gives the learner the ease of quickly knowing when they need to engage with the content.

Tip #3:  Use High Contrast Regardless of what color you use, ensure that every piece of text is readable and that there’s plenty of contrast. It is imperative that every learner is able to read all of the content, including sight or vision-impaired persons. (They use screen reading software to interpret the text, and it’s got to be high-contrast to be decipherable.) You won’t know what type of device your learner is using to view your course. Different monitor settings or brightness controls on mobile devices can alter the experience. Prepare for every scenario.

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Sally Cox is an Instructional Designer, Certified Online Training Professional, Adobe trainer, and eLearning professional through her company kreatable.com. She's an Adobe Community Professional and Adobe User Group manager, and her vast experience includes set designer for "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" in the 1980s, for WQED-TV, Pittsburgh.

Adobe Captivate: Overlay the TOC or Separate?

by Kevin Siegel, COTP, CTT It's easy to add a Table of Contents (TOC) to a Captivate project. Simply choose Project > Table of Contents to open the Skin Editor. Click Show TOC (put a check in the box) and the TOC appears on the preview (its contents are totally editable... a check mark next to the slide means the slide will appear on the TOC). By default, the TOC is set to Separate which means that it will appear outside of the main lesson area and make the overal window wider by a few hundred pixels. In the image below, you can see the TOC at the left of the lesson. The TOC can be positioned to the left or the right of the screen. The default position is left.

If you want to include a TOC in your lesson but you don't want the project width to be any wider than necessary, you can elect to Overlay the TOC (meaning it will be hidden by default and will appear only if the learner clicks a button).  To create an Overlay TOC, open the Skin Editor and from the bottom of the Editor, click the Settings button to open the TOC Settings dialog box.

At the top left of the dialog box, click Overlay and then click the OK button.

The TOC won't automatically appear onscreen for learners. Instead, learners will need to click an icon in the corner of the screen to open the TOC. That icon is shown in the first image below. The second image shows the open TOC along with an icon that will collapse the TOC. Alternatively, learners can click a TOC button on the playbar to show or hide the TOC (shown in the third image below).

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Looking for training on Adobe Captivate? Check out these two awesome classes.

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Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP, is the founder and president of IconLogic. Following a career in Public Affairs with the US Coast Guard and in private industry, Kevin has spent decades as a technical communicator, classroom and online trainer, public speaker, and has written hundreds of computer training books for adult learners. He has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

LIVE, ONLINE TRAINING: The End of Anonymity

by Jennie Ruby, COTP

An online class is not a webinar. Webinars have a well-earned reputation for being snooze fests. Often they are required attendance. The speakers are not necessarily experienced public speakers. The content may or may not be intrinsically interesting—think, policy roll-out for next year’s open enrollment insurance period. And the audience may be massive: a required-attendance companywide webinar for a large, international company could well have a couple hundred attendees. All of that is the perfect recipe for attendees to multitask, dip in and out, turn down the audio, and drift away. In an online class, however, you can’t let this happen. Part of the problem? Anonymity. In a large webinar attendees know that no one notices whether they are present and paying attention or not. In an online class, one of your best tools for student engagement is to eradicate anonymity through the use of name-calling. No, no, I don’t mean you call your students bad words! I mean you learn the names of your students, and you call your students by name early and often. It all starts with your student introductions. If you have fewer than about a dozen students, you can do audio introductions. Give each student about 2 minutes of airtime for an introduction. Even if the introductions eat up 20 minutes of a full-day class, the benefit is well worth the time.  Give specific guidelines on what the introduction should contain: “Now, I’d like to meet each of you. I’d like you to tell us your name, the organization you work for, your job title, and where you are calling from.” By giving a very specific formula of what you are looking for, you decrease the chance that a student will launch into a lengthy, life-story type introduction. Instead, most students will follow the formula.  Then, to make the intros a little more personal, have a back-up question for each student. I might ask, in a course about eLearning, “What kinds of eLearning do you typically create?” Or I might ask something specific about the location the student is calling from. Then I react to their answer—not just, “Okay, next.” Instead, I make an empathetic comment about what they said. “Wow, so you do basically all types of eLearning! They really keep you busy, don’t they!”  Just the little personal touch of listening to each student’s introduction, and reacting with a personal question or comment or two, goes a long way toward creating a positive, and personalized, experience for the student. And don’t let that personalization lapse! Throughout the class, call on students by name. If possible, tie key points in the class to something you learned about them in the introductions. Even now and then saying something like, “Isn’t that right, Samuel?” makes the class feel personal, and keeps the student from drifting off to email.  “Wait, did I hear my name?” thinks the student. “The instructor might call on me at any time!” Don’t let this valuable method for personalization and engagement pass you by. Make sure to do at least some kind of introductions in all of your online learning courses.

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Jennie Ruby, COTP, has more than 20 years of experience in training delivery, and is much loved for her enthusiasm and energy in the classroom setting, whether online or in person. She is a published author and co-author of numerous training books, including Essentials of Adobe Presenter, Editing with Microsoft Word, and Writing for Curriculum Development.